Blog #4 A Fly on the Wall

This morning I arrive at the Apple store to fix the broken battery in my one-year-old MacBook Pro. The store is located in a slow-paced part of the mall but inside, this is not the case at all. Two aisles of desks leading to the “Genius Bar” are a textbook example of one-point symmetry. The glistening iPods lay restrained in their chargers save the seven grasped by hopeful hands. The employees look in disdain knowing they must soon wipe clean the smudgy fingerprints.

The staff is eclectic despite Apple’s attempt to uniformly wrap them in “I could talk about this stuff for hours” T-shirts. This is likely encouraged, or even required, by management as the group looks eerily like the people seen on Mac commercials and advertisements. They look like cool and successful college students. The girls wear colored hair with long bangs covering half their faces. The men behind the Genius Bar look mostly nerdy but one stands out. He is a black man around the age of twenty-seven. He wears black thick-framed glasses and looks artistic with his grape-colored fuzzy-woven loose beanie. He also wears a grey long scarf. I think he looks cold but cool at the same time. The nerds, all white and hair pasted down, must be jealous of him.

Blog #3 Comparing Media

The news item to be compared through different media concerns eight American soldiers killed in Afghanistan by the Taliban on the third of October.

Web: 1080 words. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/04/AR2009100400778_2.html?hpid=topnews

  • Primary sources include a U.S. military spokesman, the deputy police chief of the province where the incident took place, a Taliban spokesman, the base’s company commander,  and the provincial governor.
  • Secondary sources include a lieutenant colonel and government statistics.
  • Compared to television news, the web news went far more in-depth by providing much more background information. There was much more scene setting which describe why the troops were there, how long they were there, and why they had not been able to leave as scheduled. Also, more details of the battle were brought to light as well as attempts by the U.S. military to prevent such incidents. Coverage seemed to cater to an older or more educated audience as language was more intelligent.

Television News: Approximately 3.5 minutes long. CBS 11 o’clock news.

  • Primary sources include interviews with two U.S. Army lieutenants.
  • Secondary source includes a U.S. Department of Defense video of members of  the Hakani network.
  • Television coverage was brief compared to that of  the internet. Sources are far fewer and possibly less substantial. Not much background information is given about why the soldiers were there in the first place. The Hakani network is mentioned, however, unlike in the online news story. Images are used for scene setting and language used by reporters seem to cater to a younger or possibly less educated audience.

Radio: Approximately 1.5 minutes. Fox news.

  • Primary source includes an interview or clip of top U.S. Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
  • Secondary sources include unquoted and unnamed “U.S. military officials”
  • Coverage is much more like that of television in that it was much shorter and seemed to cater to either time constraints or shorter attention spans. Like television, background information was light compared to what was provided by internet news. Sources were surprisingly infrequent and unsubstantial, even when compared with television. Sound is used to differentiate when there is a change between stories.

Cougar Attack Lead

Two San Francisco people and their dog were viciously attacked and injured by a mountain lion yesterday in Mendocino County, Calif.

Word of the Week #3

Word: peregrinations

Context: “Occupying the SculptureCenter’s main space, the installation features a half-dozen large flat screens showing various phases of Baby Ikki’s day and night peregrinations, which cumulatively add up to an odyssey.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/arts/design/18sculpture.html?_r=1

Definition: noun. A traveling from one country to another; a wandering; sojourn in foreign countries.

Usage: If I get accepted to study abroad, my peregrination will begin in London and hopefully take me farther east.

Word of the Week #2

Word: canny

Context: “she had to be canny to make it through that part of her life.” (Prof. McMillan)

Definition: adjective. Having or showing shrewdness and good judgment, esp. in money or business matters.

Usage: All of these years of school couldn’t teach me to be as canny as six months of unaided hard work and bill-paying have.

Favorite Writing

Although my favorite type of writing is non-fiction, my favorite piece of writing is not. I rarely read fictional tales but since a professor assigned 100 Years of Solitude, I see the genre in a different light. The book, which was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Spanish then masterfully translated into English, is poetic and compelling. I felt lured into the story and I read it very quickly because I couldn’t stop. The characters of the story have their own stories that weave in and out and intertwine so that just when I want to know more about one character, Marquez pulls you away and thrusts you into another character’s life. The dream-like feeling of the whole novel is partially due to the strangeness of the scenario. All of the characters live in a place that does not exist in the real world and many of the characters have the same first name so that it becomes confusing, but entertainingly so, which one you are reading about. What I enjoy most about the novel is undoubtedly the beauty juxtaposed with the ugly and gritty reality but ultimately the ridiculousness of it all:

“Giving her some small, orphaned kisses in the hollow of her wounded hand, he opened up the the most hidden passageways of his heart and drew out an interminable and lacerated intestine, the terrible parasitic animal that had incubated in his martyrdom. He told her how he would get up at midnight to weep in loneliness and rage over the underwear that she had left to dry in the bathroom.”

I love that while such passages appear to be very deep and serious they are completely negated by other areas like when a girl ascends into the sky because she is so beautiful and not of this world. The overall effect is not one of silliness but of dreaminess.

Word of the Week #1

Word: dotage

Context: “Growing wise in our dotage!” (facebook quote).

Definition: noun [in sing. ] The period of life in which a person is old and weak.

Usage: I’ll be looking forward to the cats and warm milk in my dotage.